Патрик Томлинсон - Children of the Divide

Next layer. Trails of dots of various sizes and crimson fading to light yellow reached across the map of Gaia like rivers, but they weren’t rivers. Many of them extended straight through the oceans. Volcanic activity? No, more than that. Something from primary school planetology popped out of Jian’s longterm memory. These were tectonic plate outlines. There were too many dots to be active volcanoes, of which Gaia’s five-plus-billion year-old crust held few.

“Earthquakes,” Jian said to the room at large. Yes, it made sense. This layer represented seismic activity. A small knot of dots near Shambhala caught Jian’s attention, all tiny and yellow. Jian wasn’t sure, but he guessed the size of the dot was proportional to the intensity of the seismic event. The color coding, though… duration? Time elapsed since the event?

He zoomed in on the map until Shambhala and its surrounding area of influence took up most of the wall. There were seven clusters of hits surrounding Shambhala out to about thirty-five kilometers, if Jian was judging the scale properly, as well as a single mystery dot in the heart of Shambhala itself. But there were no volcanoes so close to the city, and the clusters were a long way from the nearest faultline. Jian pulled up a map of the area from his plant memory for reference and immediately resolved the mystery. The clusters overlapped precisely with the various mining operations humans had set up on the continent.

The facility’s sensors, whatever and wherever the hell they were, were sensitive enough to pick up the seismic signature of excavation explosions. Which also answered the question of the dot pinned in the center of Shambhala. The facility had recorded the terrorist attack on the First Contact Day parade that had set off the series of events that brought Jian here.

The mystery solved, Jian moved a hand to dismiss the layer as he had a half dozen others, but something nagged at him. Uncertain of where the feeling was coming from or why, but also unwilling to ignore it, Jian left the seismic layer in place and moved on to the next. It was… a soil erosion rate map? Yeah, no. Jian canned it as super-useful for someone, worthless to him. Next layer. Freshwater evaporation and atmospheric uptake rates? Seriously? Gods, these people were thorough. Canned, next layer. Er, something about the northern ice cap. Closed.

Jian kept up the pace, unceremoniously retaining or dropping layer after layer as quickly as he could ascertain whatever dataset they represented and determine its utility to his current dilemma. An alert chimed, signaling a sudden change in the map, at least as judged by whatever programing oversaw the facility’s projection. It wasn’t the first alert that had popped up since he’d been down here. The last one had been for a nascent hurricane developing deep at sea that might give Atlantis some trouble in ten days or so if the prevailing winds held their current bearings. Not pertinent to Jian’s search.

Still…

Jian toggled the alert icon and the map zoomed to the area of interest just a little too fast, overwhelming Jian’s sense of scale and speed, leaving him, a pilot with hundreds of hours both in simulators and in real cockpits, feeling just a touch of vertigo. The map display was just that good.

Jian averted his eyes until the map settled and instead looked down at Polly, who had been unobtrusively watching him the entire time. Jian reached out a hand and scratched the strange little insect under his, um, chin. The affection was met with an appreciative trill.

Jian’s eyes returned to the plot in front of him, and were surprised to see Shambhala in the frame, albeit to the south. The alert had originated to the north, a handful of klicks outside of what his internal map said should be the furthest reach of human settlements or activity. There were scouting camps that far out, of course, surveying for the next wave of development. But they usually stuck closer to the river. The alert came from the seismic layer. A new small, yet bright red dot had appeared. A quick comparison confirmed that it was in the same size range as the events in the various mines, except the closest mine was kilometers away. There was no reason for an excavation charge to be going off in the middle of the wilderness.

Jian considered the plot for a long moment. Long enough to notice the color of the dot shift subtly away from pure red into a reddish orange. So, the color scale was a measure of time after all. This event had just happened, and he’d been alerted to it in real time. But what the hell was it? And why was it in a remote part of undeveloped forest?

The answer struck Jian like the bombblast the dot represented. The dot in the center of Shambhala and this dot were the same thing: a terrorist’s bomb going off. Except the detonation in Shambhala had been a deliberate attack.

This wasn’t. Something had gone wrong and a device had gone off prematurely, or while it was being assembled. Whatever, the reason didn’t matter. What mattered was Jian had just discovered the location of the terrorists’ camp, or their bomb factory at the very least. It wasn’t as good as finding Benexx, but it was damned good. Jian thrust a triumphant finger at the alert icon and danced in his chair.

“Got you, motherfuckers! I’ve fucking got you!”

Jian’s jubilation lasted right up until he realized that for his discovery to mean anything, he had to share it with someone.

“Right!” He jumped out of the chair at the center of the map room and scrambled towards the pile of his expeditionary suit. Polly, ever the eager accomplice, trotted along behind him and stood watch while Jian wriggled into the suit as quickly as he could. Even running on caffeine and adrenaline, it took Jian almost twenty minutes to don the Godforsaken thing, and another ten to run all the suit integrity tests for what was going to be not even a ten-minute walk back to the Buran before the suit’s software safety protocols would even let the O 2 start flowing.

For not the first time, Jian cursed the overly-cautious eggheads who’d been in charge of designing these suits, more concerned with covering their own asses than building a system that could be put into use in the shortest time possible. If your shuttle was coming apart around you, the last thing you were worried about was triple-checking the solid waste recapture system.

After an interminable period of time, the assholes who’d programed Jian’s suit finally gave their disembodied approval as his board went green and the oxygen started to flow. Jian closed the face of his visor as he leaned back into the black nanite muck of the facility’s airlock like a scuba-diver plunging backwards into a Lovecraftian ocean.

Moments later, he and Polly emerged back in the caved-in chamber that had first revealed the facility’s entrance to Jian’s expedition not even a full week ago. Those five days felt like a lifetime. So much had changed. So much lost. And in Jian’s case, willingly sacrificed. For his friends, both dead and living. At least he hoped ze was still living.

His most immediate concern, however, was getting the hell out of this hole. One of the ropes they’d tied off to the broken harvester and used to extricate themselves the last time sat coiled and forgotten in a corner of the cavern. The hole back up to the surface still looked too far to jump, even in the weak gravity, but Jian didn’t figure he had anything to lose in the attempt.

To give himself the best chance, Jian scrambled up to the tallest point of the rubble pile left over from the cave-in; a hulking monolith of rock that looked like it had been strategically placed there by Kubrick’s production team. The same one that had almost killed him on the way down here the second time. Jian wasn’t sure if that was a metaphor for anything. He hadn’t been the best student of literature.